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Alley Cat 1/10

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illannani

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Nov 25, 2015
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Has anyone played the DOS game Alley Cat? I just got it and played for a little and it was the worst time of my life. I don't want to sound too negative, but i just really didn't like this game and i want to know what you guys thought of it.
 
SomeGuy said:
A lot of early games were very cheesy, clunky, incomplete, buggy, and difficult to learn. Especially if you did not have the manual. That was just the nature of them.
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Alley Cat is the opposite of all that, though (okay, I could give you cheesy). Very well done as a simple arcade game, and from a technical standpoint it was one of the better ones on 1st-gen PCs.

I could understand not liking the game, but comparing it to Donkey?? Madness, I say!
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:D
 
illannani said:
Has anyone played the DOS game Alley Cat? I just got it and played for a little and it was the worst time of my life. I don't want to sound too negative, but i just really didn't like this game and i want to know what you guys thought of it.
Click to expand...

I would 100% agree with you had I played the game for the first time now. With every generation of game that is released the bar is lifted in terms of what you expect from a game. I must admit I find it hard to go back now and play a lot of the all time classics I cherish to this day.

But going back to about 1989 when I played the CGA version on our very first IBM PC Compatible, I had a blast! That along with Sopwith and a few other basic games of which the names escape me right now were fantastic to play at the time.
 
I find Alley Cat to be particularly enjoyable. I recognize it as an exceptionally well-polished piece of PC software. Its even better on the PCjr. than the PC because it takes advantage of the PCjr.'s ability to redefine the palette for different, if not more colors. In some ways it is superior to the Atari 8-bit original from which it is derived.

Of course the jumping is a bit annoying, being rather stiff and leading to frustration. For an early 1980s title, it is very good, predating similar mechanics in Super Mario Bros. by at least two years.
 
The PC version of Alley Cat is also unique for its era in that it sets its own timer, allowing it to run at the same speed on machines with vastly different processor speeds. I've played it on a 600 MHz Pentium III and it was perfectly fine!

One quirk of the game is the discontinuity of the cat's size -- when in the fish bowl, the cat suddenly becomes as small as the fish it's trying to catch, but outside, it's the size of a normal cat.
 
I played this game for hours, :D
Come on, we are talking early 80's here, what do you expect? Halo?

I also played a lot to these: Congo Bongo!, Sopwith, Zaxxon, The ancient art of war (played this one reallyyyy a lot!), Gato, Sokoban, ultima 1 & II.
Also do you remember a game called Saboteur? I remember playing Saboteur II and mapping the complex ... :D
 
I think Alley Cat is historically significant because it was one of the first graphical arcade/action games on the IBM PC.
 
Great Hierophant said:
I find Alley Cat to be particularly enjoyable. I recognize it as an exceptionally well-polished piece of PC software. Its even better on the PCjr. than the PC because it takes advantage of the PCjr.'s ability to redefine the palette for different, if not more colors. In some ways it is superior to the Atari 8-bit original from which it is derived.

Of course the jumping is a bit annoying, being rather stiff and leading to frustration. For an early 1980s title, it is very good, predating similar mechanics in Super Mario Bros. by at least two years.
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Well said. It's an excellent game, delicately balanced frustration/reward rollercoaster. Reccommended.
 
I think Alley Cat was one of the best games for the PC of its era, in particular how it managed to look decent on a CGA with an RGB monitor, unlike many other ports of Atari games designed for more colours. The game is difficult, but not impossibly so. Probably my favourite part is the digital sound effect for the kiss when you finish a level, which you need an original IBM PC with original speaker & timings to hear properly. (Everything else works fine on a modern PC.)

Bill Williams was a unique game designer too. He took the unusual option of pursuing theology late in life after being frustrated with writing games for Nintendo NES and published a book, which I recommend. There aren't too many game designers out there who have published books on topics other than game development that I would really recommend.
 
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